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In the nineteenth century, the Dutch established time signals in their Atlantic colonies to synchronise maritime navigation with European standards. In Paramaribo (Suriname), a sophisticated sequence of apparatus -- including time balls,…
The late-sixteenth century witnessed a major expansion of Dutch shipping activity from northern European waters to the Indian Ocean and beyond. At a time when the Renaissance had just arrived on the North Sea's shores, scientist-scholars,…
Among the first devices used to measure the time we find the sundials and the water-clocks, as told by Vitruvius in his book on the Architecture. The sundials work because of the shadows cast by a rod or pole, the gnomon, on their…
Atomic clocks are at the leading edge of accuracy and precision and are essential for synchronization of distributed critical infrastructure, position, navigation and timing, and scientific applications. There has been a breakthrough in the…
A time scale is a procedure for accurately and continuously marking the passage of time. It is exemplified by Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), and provides the backbone for critical navigation tools such as the Global Positioning System…
Deployed optical clocks will improve positioning for navigational autonomy, provide remote time standards for geophysical monitoring and distributed coherent sensing, allow time synchronization of remote quantum networks, and provide…
The use of the observed positions of celestial bodies to determine the location of a navigator and to direct vessels, was an aspiration of ancient seafarers. Various peoples, in the Mediterranean as much as in the Indian Ocean, in China as…
Pulsars are natural cosmic clocks. On long timescales they rival the precision of terrestrial atomic clocks. Using a technique called pulsar timing, the exact measurement of pulse arrival times allows a number of applications, ranging from…
Time use surveys in Denmark, Spain, France, Ireland, Italy and United Kingdom are analyzed to provide start, noon and end times for the main activities of a society: labor (the focus of this preprint), sleeping and eating. Also, the…
Passive remote sensing techniques have become more and more popular for detection and characterization purposes. The advantage of using the Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) are the well known signals emitted and the availability…
Weakly coupled oscillators adjust their dynamics to work in unison: they synchronize. This ubiquitous phenomenon is observed for oscillating pendulum, electronic devices, as well as clapping crowds or flashing fireflies. In effect,…
Knowledge about the characteristics of the atmospheric boundary layer is vital for the understanding of redistribution of air and suspended contents that are particularly driven by turbulent motions. Despite many modelling studies, detailed…
The GRACE and GRACE-FO missions have provided an unprecedented quantification of large-scale changes in the water cycle. However, it is still an open problem of how these missions' data sets can be referenced to a ground truth. Meanwhile,…
In the 17th Century, the Dutch Republic played an important role in the scientific revolution. Much of the correspondence among contemporary scientists and their associates is now digitally available through the ePistolarium webtool,…
The technological discoveries and developments since dawn of civilization that resulted in the modern wristwatch are linked to the evolution of Science itself. A history of over 6000 years filled with amazing technical prowess since the…
Precise time scale is the universal base for all measurements. Here we report the deployment of a compact and transportable optical clock to a timekeeping institution and steering an active hydrogen maser to generate an optical time scale,…
Detection of a signal hidden by noise within a time series is an important problem in many astronomical searches, i.e. for light curves containing the contributions of periodic/semi-periodic components due to rotating objects and all other…
This study reviews the design and signal processing of ship borne ultrasonic altimeter wave measurements. The system combines a downward facing ultrasonic altimeter to capture the sea surface elevation as a time series, and an inertial…
Between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, long-haul oceanic voyages of exploration and discovery routinely carried astronomical tent observatories to support land-based longitude determinations using heavy and cumbersome…
The performance of optical clocks has strongly progressed in recent years, and accuracies and instabilities of 1 part in 10^18 are expected in the near future. The operation of optical clocks in space provides new scientific and…